Just How Wesleyan Are We? A Historical Perspective

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Created: 08 January 2015

One of the important facets of the contemporary debate about identity in the Church of the Nazarene is the question of just how Wesleyan we are. On one hand, there are those who want to assert the Wesleyan component of Nazarene identity very strongly, who argue that being more Wesleyan will make us better Nazarenes.

On the other hand, there are some who suggest that the Church of the Nazarene—and the American Holiness Movement in general—has moved beyond Wesley, that it would be best just to leave him in the past.

The fact is, John Wesley’s Methodist movement got planted in North America without his knowledge, and it grew and prospered largely without his personal influence. North American Methodists were, in principle, committed to Wesley’s doctrine as contained in his official sources, but they resisted his personal influence. Additionally, the North American religious scene was very different from the one found in Britain, where the established Church of England formed the theological background against which Wesley’s innovations and interpretations were understood. In America, there was no such established church, and the religious background formed itself from a mix of widely disparate theological sources. In that environment, Methodists in America picked up from Wesley those things they found helpful and useful but also ignored those things that did not make sense in their own contexts.

The Wesleyan roots of our identity are a necessary part; they are there, and they are not going anywhere anytime soon. But they are not sufficient; there are other pieces in play as well, and we cannot ignore them while expecting to move forward.

If one thinks of a theological system as a language—a way of talking about God that helps people live out their lives with God and others—then American Methodists—in their different cultural environment, with a different religious background— did not speak the same theological language that Wesley spoke. Instead, what developed among American Methodists can be thought of as pidgin Wesleyanism.

In linguistics, a pidgin is a simplified form of a language that develops so that people who do not speak a common language can communicate with one another—usually so they can trade. The most well-known example is the pidgin English (Tok Pisin) of Papua New Guinea. A pidgin contains many of the features of its parent language but is not itself a complete language. The vocabulary is usually limited and the grammatical structures very simple. Something of the flavor of the original language is retained (so, for example, in Tok Pisin, the word for always is oltaim [“all-time”]), but it is not the same.

American Methodists picked up on a good deal of Wesley’s theological vocabulary and distinct ideas. However, in their context, they often used those words and ideas differently from the way Wesley did, or how he intended. What they said sounded a lot like what Wesley said, but it was not the same. It was a pidgin language, a simplified version that was adapted to the more rough-and-ready environment of the American context, but it was sufficient to anchor the movement and help it grow.

Pidgin languages, however, because they are not full languages, are not adequate for everyday life. Because they have limited vocabulary, they don’t have words or expressions for everything people need to talk about. Therefore, when pidgin languages are pressed into service beyond their initial use as trade languages, they begin to absorb other words and grammatical structures from languages around them. Eventually, a new language entirely emerges, sometimes called a creole (such as the language spoken in Haiti—a mixture of French and African languages). A creole is a fully-functioning language that sounds a lot like the original language that gave it birth, but—like a child compared to its parents—has its own, individual identity.*

The theological language that developed among the American Methodists, and eventually among the American Holiness Movement, should be understood as a theological creole. It is a fully-functioning theological language in its own right. However, it is not the strict descendant of any single theological tradition; it is, rather, an amalgam of several different theological languages that were combined in a unique socio-political and cultural context.

If we thought about the theological language spoken by the founders of the Church of the Nazarene— coming, as they did, from Methodist, Pentecostal, and Primitivist traditions—as a theological creole rather than as a “corrupted” or “advanced” (depending on your perspective) form of Wesley’s theological language, it may help us ask more accurate questions about our theological identity. To begin with, it would help us escape the trap of understanding our theological identity too narrowly, as if we only need to worry about whether we are faithful to Wesley’s theological trajectory—either to say we have deviated from it or to say we have moved it forward. There are many other influences—other sources for our theological vocabulary and grammar—that must be included in our discussion if we are going to make any headway.

Reckoning with those other forces—theological, cultural, even political—might also give us a way out of the current polarities that have developed in our denomination between those who want to go back to Wesley and those who want to leave him behind. The Wesleyan roots of our identity are a necessary part; they are there, and they are not going anywhere anytime soon. But they are not sufficient; there are other pieces in play as well, and we cannot ignore them while expecting to move forward.

If we Nazarenes can admit to and begin to own the theological language we do speak—our own unique Wesleyan creole—then we could begin to figure out what it would mean to speak that language as best we can, and use it to proclaim a version of the gospel that is, in all counts, Christian, holiness, and missional—a message the world needs to hear.

TIMOTHY J. CRUTCHER is professor of church history and theology at Southern Nazarene University in Bethany, Oklahoma, and affiliate professor of theology and church history at Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri.

*By "fully functioning" here, we mean the minimal standard that allows for a full level of interpersonal interaction. This is not to say that the language is complete or does not still have gaps—even significant ones. It merely indicates that it fulfills the basic needs of everyday life.